It Happened One Doomsday (15 page)

Foul smoke from scorched wiring and melting metal prickled the back of her throat, and her mouth filled with a coppery aftertaste.

She sensed Hellbringer's infernal presence through the smoke. As it climbed across her skin, she felt the demon bound into the car, its very essence enshrined within the black-painted steel.

Hellbringer wasn't just a cursed artifact. The car itself was a demon in its own right.

As if it whispered into her ear, she could hear its raging desire to run wild across the land. To roam free in the wind.

And with that craving for freedom came a complete absence of fear. It wasn't afraid of death, destruction, or even being cast back into the pits of hell. The only thing Hellbringer feared was imprisonment.

Its solitude echoed through the smoke. The car had been locked away during most of its time on earth. Trapped. Unable to taste the freedom and relentless speed that defined the core of its being.

Hellbringer roused itself from exhaustion and reached toward her. Her consciousness briefly touched the swirling edge of Hellbringer's energy, a chaotic, primordial force that threatened to draw her in whole.

For a terrifying instant, she feared Hellbringer would pull her soul in through the crystal circle. Before the car could reconnect to whatever source of evil had cursed Greyson, Dru closed the magic circle, trapping Hellbringer inside.

Magic feedback jolted through her, again and again. Wave after wave of magical energy crashed against the bounds of the circle, pummeling Dru where she sat. But the circle did its work.

As Dru held on with all of her willpower, the intensity of each wave started to diminish. Strangely, she felt a pang of guilt, as if she had just kicked an animal.

A dangerous, aggressive animal who wanted to be free of its cage. An animal ruled by instincts and hungers that threatened innocent lives. But still, for the briefest moment, she could almost understand Hellbringer.

One after another, the crystals fractured, as if they'd been dropped from a great height. The individual lights of the dying rocks flared through her tightly closed eyelids. The afterimage of the copper circle, and the star within it, became a flash of orange zigzags on a red background.

Then it was over.

Dru dropped the burning hot amethyst and scrambled to her feet. When she stumbled, Greyson caught her. She sagged against him, her head spinning. A pounding headache shot up the back of her neck and throbbed across the top of her skull, making her nauseous.

The amethyst crystal crackled with vanishing motes of bright blue light, like a just-popped flashbulb. It gradually went dark, leaving behind nothing but a grayed-out cinder.

“Damn.” Opal blinked. “Never seen a circle light up like that before. Did it work?”

“Think so,” Dru murmured into Greyson's strong shoulder. And then she straightened up and saw his face.

The horns were back. Shorter than they'd been at the restaurant but still there nonetheless, where they hadn't been a minute ago. Worse, his eyes once again glowed red.

With a terrible sinking feeling, she backed away.

“Dru, what's wrong?” His voice trailed off as he saw his hands. The tips of his fingers ended in sharp black claws. He slowly turned them over, as if waiting for everything to go back to normal. It didn't.

Without another word, he rushed over to the oil-stained shop sink in the corner of the garage and bent to inspect his face in the streaked mirror.

Dru hurried after him. “It should have worked.” Mind racing, she backtracked through all of her calculations, the combination of crystals, the configuration of the circle, trying to determine where she could have gone wrong. But there was no way to know.

Greyson's clawed fists tightened on the edge of the sink. “Then it's only a matter of time. Sooner or later, I'll become the demon again.”

“Not as long as I'm here.” She waited until she had his attention once more. “If we're going to cure you, Greyson, we need more information.”

“About what?”

“That symbol under Hellbringer's hood,” Dru said. “Did you put it there?”

Greyson shook his head no. “It was there when I got the car.”

“And where did you get the car from?”

He hesitated. “An estate auction. Why, is that important?”

“It depends.” An ominous feeling settled in the pit of her stomach. “Whose estate was it?”

18

LOT SIX HUNDRED AND SIXTY-SIX

As it turned out, the auction had been handled online, so Greyson didn't know whose estate it was.

Refusing to give up, Dru promised him that she would figure out their next move, no matter how long it took. She didn't imagine that it would take all night.

Opal brought them all coffee before the only nearby Starbucks closed. But she kept yawning so much, Dru couldn't stand the guilt and sent her home around midnight. Determined to stay and work this through to the end, Dru flipped back and forth through the pages of her old books, scribbling notes on napkins.

Eventually, Rane led her from the cold concrete floor to Greyson's cramped combination of living room and kitchenette. Even though Greyson insisted that he felt fine, Dru didn't feel comfortable leaving him unsupervised, and Rane refused to leave her side.

As the hours dragged on through the dead of night, Dru caught herself nodding off while trying to redo her Stanislaus calculations. She sucked down every last drop of coffee, but it wasn't enough. She was utterly exhausted. Her eyelids grew too heavy to stay open.

She took off her glasses and decided to rest her eyes. Just for a minute, she promised herself.

It seemed like only a moment later that Dru awoke with a start. Dawn sunlight streamed in around the edges of the window shades in Greyson's apartment. It fell in golden swaths across the cluttered living room, illuminating a pocked dartboard, a well-used weight bench, and a half-rebuilt engine stuffed with red rags.

Her phone told her it was six in the morning. “Son of a guano,” she muttered under her breath, then scrambled to find her glasses. A blue plaid blanket dropped from her shoulders.

Glasses on, she looked around from where she lay on the couch, disoriented and foggy-headed in the morning light.

Greyson's furniture was old and worn, and that was being kind. A black-and-white checkered flag was draped in one corner. Car parts clustered on every available surface.

The wall behind her was covered with snapshots of old muscle cars in various states of disassembly and repair, punctuated by finished projects gleaming with fresh paint. The whole wall was an unfamiliar mishmash of bright paint, stripes, and shining wheels.

In the center of it all hung a framed snapshot of a scraggly-haired teenage boy, obviously Greyson in his high school years, shoulder to shoulder with a grinning freckled girl and a thin-faced middle-aged man in a leather jacket, the three of them leaning against what looked like a bright orange Corvette.

That was the only picture with people in it. The rest were nothing but cars.

The welcoming aroma of coffee filled the air. Greyson sat on a stool in his kitchenette, pecking at the keys of an old laptop. A black leather cowboy hat crowned his head as if it belonged there, hiding his horns. But his glowing red eyes were impossible to ignore.

They cut across the room to her, unreadable. “Morning,” he said.

Looking at him now, in the clear morning light, there was only one thing she could think about.

The kiss.

The thought of it brought a rush of blood to her head, making her giddy. And confused.

She had no idea how to sort out what she was feeling. About him. About Nate. About the insane concept that she, herself, could actually be a sorceress. Everything was happening too fast.

From the armchair beside her, a chainsaw-like rumble made her jump. Until she realized it was Rane, snoring openmouthed. Most of Rane's body was hidden under a blanket, but the arms and legs that stuck out didn't look like they were attached at the right angle, as if she'd simply splatted onto the couch from a high altitude.

Dru got to her feet carefully, afraid to wake Rane. But then again, Rane could probably sleep through an aboveground nuclear test.

As Dru crept toward the kitchenette, Greyson stirred and got out a mug emblazoned with a five-pointed Mopar logo.

“Thing only makes one cup at a time.” Greyson opened a kitchen cabinet, revealing shelves of ramen noodles and Spam. He got out a single serving of coffee and started it brewing. “I don't get visitors all that much.”

Dru gave him a sad smile. “Ever?”

His red eyes met hers briefly, then glanced behind her. She followed his gaze to a half-empty bag of cat food sitting on the floor by the back door.

“There's a stray cat, hangs out in the alley sometimes. A red tabby. Likes tuna.”

“Really? What's his name?”

Greyson shrugged as if he didn't care, but a slight hesitation beforehand told her that he did. “Doesn't seem to need one. Mostly he responds to ‘Want some food?'”

She watched Greyson as he fixed her a cup of coffee from his single-serve machine. Everything in his life seemed to be built around cars, not people. As if he had given up on any personal connections and devoted himself to things that couldn't talk back.

She cleared her throat. “So, who are the people in your photo? They seem nice.”

He didn't answer at first. When he did, it was without meeting her gaze. “My family.”

“Do they live around here?” In the silence that followed, she added nervously, “Do they work on cars too?”

He slid a steaming mug of coffee in front of her. “Cars can be tough to fix. But at least they
can
be fixed. Some things can't.” Buried under his gruff tone, she could hear the hurt in his voice.

She decided it would be better to leave that topic alone. Whatever had happened with his family, Greyson seemed to have honed his mechanical skills to wall himself off from the human world.

No wonder he had forged such a strong connection to Hellbringer. The car attracted him, played to his biggest defenses, and his loneliness provided an opening for the demon's power. He was the perfect target.

“You said you needed info about the estate,” Greyson said, interrupting her thoughts.

“That the car came from? Yes, absolutely. Did you find anything?”

By way of answer, he turned his laptop screen to face her. It was a list of auction items. A very long list.

She scrolled through it, not sure what she was looking for. She found the usual items she'd expect to see in a big estate sale: furniture, jewelry, miscellaneous antiques. But then things got a little strange.

A collection of rare insects. A medical autoclave. A sixteenth-century German tapestry depicting a scroll with seven wax seals.

“Well, that's something you don't see every day. Book of Revelation,” she explained at his quizzical look. “Biblical prophecy about the end of the world. Who would want to hang that in their home?”

The deeper she got into the list, the weirder things became.

A stuffed Alpine ibex. A test tube incubator. An alphabetized collection of bat wings.

She pointed at the screen with a growing sense of dread. “This was no ordinary estate. Who was the owner?”

Greyson shook his head. “They don't give any names. But I did find an address in New Mexico. The weird thing is, when you look it up on a map, you can see the road, but no house. The road just ends.”

“In the middle of the neighborhood?”

“No. Middle of the desert.”

“So not exactly the sociable type.” Slowly, Dru nodded. “That makes sense. I'll bet they had some obfuscation spells in place.” Before he asked, she added, “Camouflage.”

“So you think this person was a sorcerer?”

“Had to be. Monstrously powerful one, too. Or someone who made an infernal bargain.”

Greyson didn't look convinced. “Or maybe just someone who liked to collect weird antiques.”

She jabbed a finger at the screen. “Who else has a laboratory-grade fume hood and a vacuum pump in their house? And jars full of dead animal parts?”

Greyson's red eyes narrowed. “Maybe a veterinarian.”

“Sure. A veterinarian who operates on
demons
.” Dru kept scrolling through the list, more worried by the moment. “If this is all from one house, it must've been huge. There are over a thousand items here. Are there any books?”

“Think so.” He took the laptop, typed for a moment, then turned it back to her.

Dru's jaw dropped open.

The Prophecies of Paloma
.

Severina's Spirit Guide
.

The Scripture of Ephraim
.

Dru pointed at the last one. “That's part of the Wicked Scriptures. I thought they'd all been burned.”

Greyson looked uneasy. “The Wicked Scriptures?”

“About everyone dying horribly in a fiery doomsday at the end of the world.” She kept going down the list, and the books kept getting darker. “Some of these are seriously bad mojo from the Middle Ages.
Formulaes Apocrypha.
That's all about questionable studies into the nature of primordial destruction. And the
Treatise Maleficarum
. A who's who for the pits of hell.” A horrifying thought seized her. “I can't believe they auctioned this stuff off to the public. You know what kind of creeps are going to buy these books?” She stood up and paced the tiny kitchenette, a hard knot forming in her stomach.

“Anything in here tell you how to undo what they did?”

“There's too much stuff here for one lone sorcerer. It had to be a group of sorcerers, all acting together. If even one of them was still around today, they wouldn't have let this stuff get auctioned. No way. Which means they're all dead,” Dru said. “Whatever they were up to, it probably got them all killed. This is seriously worse than I thought.
Tons
worse.”